Vol. 19 · No. 4 · Issue 61 · Winter 2001 · pp. 43-63 (21)

Environmentalists, Nuclear Waste, and the Politics of Passive Exclusion in Germany

Christian Hunold

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Abstract

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German Green Party and some of the country's environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipments of highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose in doing so is to test John Dryzek's 1996 claim that enviromentalists ought to beware of waht they wish for concerning inclusion in the liberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, argues Dryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizing public policy because such inclusion may compromise the survival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects for ecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecological modernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationships between the state and the environmental movement that foster the emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.